Game Day: Random Stellar Encounters

We played our first Star Wars game since December on Friday. Prepping the session had me digging through my various web resources looking for inspiration (and new entries for the campaign blog). They’re a useful collection of tools for anyone running a Star Wars/scifi game, so I thought I’d share them.

Finally, Hexagonstar.com has a very cool little planet and character name generator that lets you specify the starting letter, number of syllables, number of words, use of hyphens and apostrophes, suffixes, and orbit numbers. It doesn’t let you choose random names by species, but it’s still a handy tool, particularly when you already have a name in mind (or at least, a certain sound in mind).

Keeping track of what’s where is important to any game. There are three notable galaxy maps available online, two of which originated as posters. The Star Wars Insider galaxy map is from the print magazine that used to be published by Paizo, and is still available for purchase from them for $1 (I plan on buying at least two of these the next time I order something from Paizo). While you’re at it, pick up Paizo’s hexagonal star map, also from Star Wars Isider, also for $1.

The Map of the Galaxy far, far away… is easily the most detailed map of the galaxy I’ve come across. It’s includes a bunch of stuff from the extended universe, including the various novels, and is available as a PDF download as well as JPEGs. I’m sorely tempted to take this to a print shop to see what they could do with it; a nice big poster version of this map would look great in the Game Room.

A few weeks back I was working on the campaign, and decided I wanted to date our sagas using the Star Wars calendar. Then I realized I had no idea what the Star Wars calendar looked like. Fortunately, Wookiepedia had an entry on the Galactic Standard Calendar, and I gotta say, it’s far more complicated than I was expecting: 10 months, seven weeks per month, three festival weeks, and tree holidays. Still, at least now we know what happened when in the campaign.

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Nuketown is a speculative fiction website that's been published continuously since 1996.

It's publishing focus is articles, reviews and editorials about science fiction, fantasy, and horror with heroic or libertarian overtones. It covers a variety of topics within the speculative fiction genre, including games, movies, soundtracks, books, and websites.